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Breakthroughs

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The past 3 weeks have been massive for me in terms of accomplishments. My first ever internship came to an end last week, I signed up for the Game Design Pro League and I got my first freelance gig! I wanted to write about this sooner, but I've been feeling very lazy lately. So, I decided to sum up the eventful parts.

The End of a Journey

For the past 2 ½ months, I worked as a front-end developer at OPD One. It was an enriching experience for me and I had amazing peers from whom I've learnt valuable lessons. I have a better understanding of the considerations made while writing code and the importance of communication when working in a team.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was how much emphasis is put on building a useable product. Feasibility is another major constraint. So, while implementing new features, one may end up using methods that seemed unconventional. This was eye-opening for me. It made me realize that there's no need to have it all figured out right from the outset. Using third-party tools used to seem really hacky to me. However, I realized that it isn't an issue when you're rolling out a v1. In fact, some of these tools are heavily curated, and it makes more sense to integrate them into your application rather than building them from scratch.

I've gained a lot of insights throughout the course of my internship and I feel like I've made tremendous progress as a developer. I'm planning on dedicating an entire post to the lessons I learned in my internship. However, I don't think that I'll be able to do justice here. So, keep your eyes peeled!

The Pro Leagues

Recently, the Game Dev Pro Leagues were announced. Although I knew that it was in the works, I was shocked because it was announced way sooner than I had expected. I was planning on paying for it using my earnings from my internship. I knew this was an opportunity that I didn't want to miss out on, and I had to act fast as there were limited spots available.

Fortunately, my parents are very supportive of me. So, it didn't require much effort from my end to convince them to let me join the cohort. The only catch is that I now have to help out with the household chores I usually tend to worm out of.

There were a few reasons I considered before deciding to join the pro leagues:

The Pro Leagues, Lambda School, and Y Combinator seem to function in a similar fashion. The course is really rigorous and you'll be working in teams with like-minded and driven people. So, I'm certain that I'll improve a lot. The gaming industry has been thriving a lot lately, and it continues to grow. I feel that the Pro Leagues will allow me to be an early adopter in the field, and I could easily establish myself as an expert as I improve. The cohort is going to be mentored by Varun Mayya, an entrepreneur whom I really look up to. I'm sure that I'll be able to learn a lot of valuable things from him. Right now, a problem I'm facing is that I don't have a decent PC. My laptop can barely run the Unreal Engine and it lags a lot. However, I've started earning now and things are looking pretty good. I'm confident that I'll have saved up enough by the time the Diwali sale comes around.

My First Gig

The Avalon Army's Discord server has been a boon for me. It has a job-postings channel that is always bustling with activity. It's really easy to land a gig there if you're skillful enough. That's why I tend to skim through the postings there frequently. One day, I stumbled upon a post that caught my eye. A startup named Algokart was looking for frontend/full-stack developers and the pay was great too! They also had mentioned a list of skills required and I felt like I checked most of them.

The gig seemed too good to be true, so I began to do some research about the startup and I learned a lot of interesting stuff. Algokart is a trading platform that makes use of tested algorithms to optimize your returns! The founders had made it to the finals of Y Combinator while in their final year of engineering college. And from an article written by Gaurav, one of the founders, I learned that they had come up with the idea in their dorm room and they managed to scale up to over a thousand users in a couple of months! Their story seemed inspiring to me, and I felt that I could learn a lot from them. I decided to reach out to Gaurav and lucky for me, he thought that I could be a good fit for the role.

It's exhilarating for me because I'm getting paid by the hour. We make use of a software that takes screenshots periodically whenever I begin working on the tasks assigned to me. The tracker takes care of the creation of a contract and it gets renewed once every two weeks. I have a fixed hourly billing rate and I get paid every fortnight. Eventually, my billing rate will increase too! The working hours are flexible, as I'll only be busy when tasks are assigned to me. This gives me a lot of free time to improve on my backend skills so that I can confidently take up more challenging full-stack tasks.

What's Next?

For now, I'll be working on improving my development skills and getting familiarized with the Unreal Engine. I'll try to keep you posted here, so until next time!